


Fall Faster

by spacego



Category: Korean Drama, 김과장 | Good Manager (TV)
Genre: M/M, Post-Canon, a cat-and-dog love, awkward confessions, hyperbolic angsting
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-01-03
Updated: 2019-01-03
Packaged: 2019-10-03 10:41:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,750
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17282546
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spacego/pseuds/spacego
Summary: Seo Yul tries to take care of his own happiness.





	Fall Faster

**Author's Note:**

> Takes place about a year or so after the end of the series (ep. 20), so let's say Sung-Ryong took that undercover job offered to him, and many more... Oh the adventures he'd gone on since then.

Kim Sung-Ryong was a man of few regrets. He could count all his regrets on one hand... if he had six fingers on each hand, that is.

He still didn't understand why he let Boss Bae open up new nightclub joints in this godforsaken place. Midway between Gunsan where people fight with knives and baseball bats, and Seoul where people fight with pocketbooks and halfway-decent paid thugs, was a dustbowl of a death valley called... well... what was it again?

He vaguely remembered that it was supposed to be Flower Whatnot or Something Spring or some such upbeat name. But even the locals seemed to have forgotten the town's official name and proudly called themselves the Undead of Death Valley.

His back was starting to ache, and his hand was getting numb. He didn't even dare touch the robin's egg-sized bump on the crown of his head, and he tried not to flinch because it would only make his cheek bleed again.

* * *

He sighed when the hand around his wrist tightened.

He still didn't understand why he made Yul come all the way to Death Valley, why he hadn't gone to Seoul instead.

He had listened to Yul grumbling all the way from Seoul until his phone ran out of juice. By the time Sung-Ryong managed to find his phone charger and in the short ten minutes it needed to charge itself to minimum power, Yul had bombarded his inbox well enough that he was in dire need of a new SD card.

The hand around his wrist tightened up again. Even in the half-darkness of his berdoom he could see Yul's restless fingers rubbing slowly up and down as if searching for a pulse.

Two long fingers dug against the crease near his wristbone. Sung-Ryong felt his heart flip from that one small gesture.

He dared to look up and away from those fingers. He dared himself to study Yul's face. That downturned lip and that fretful crease.

His bones protested even his slight shift but Sung-Ryong managed to turn himself to lie on his side, one arm uncomfortably trapped.

He was so close to Yul that he was breathing he air that Yul breathed out. He traced a slow path up Yul's noble nose, to the crease that had formed between his brows.

"I'm sorry," he whispered wondering if Yul heard him.

* * *

Yul frowned and then scowled.

It was that damned car graveyard again. Where all scrap metal went to die. Where those TQ-paid thugs were taking Sung-Ryong to die.

The rational part of him told him that it was all a dream.

Yul panicked nonetheless because no matter how far he stepped on the gas, his car wouldn't move. No matter how hard he pushed his door, the car wouldn't let him out. No matter how much he yelled, Park In-Hyuk never showed up. No matter how much he yelled or cried or cursed or pleaded, he could only watch as the noose tightened around Sung-Ryong's neck.

Then in a split second he was there.

Suddenly he was there, kicking the shit out of the people trying to take what's his. Seo-Yul never learned to share. In all of his years, he never played well with others.

And once his fist was numb and everything and everyone else fell away, he scrambled up to Sung-Rwong and grasped blindly at the rope embedded into he soft flesh of his neck right there below his adam's apple. He scrambled to find a pulse. Even though he could not hear anything above the rushing of his own blood.

The juncture of the neck, the wrists. Nothing. None of the tell-tale sign of the strong drumbeat that Sung-Ryong always marched singularly to.

Then time stopped, because he was too late.

* * *

He would have laughed, he thought, if he knew Yul wouldn't kill him come morning.

He would have laughed, but the quietly distressed man in his arms was so pitiful.

He had heard about it, of course, but he had dismissed it because he hadn't seen it. What was it that some wise men said: you don't always trust what you can see for yourself?

Well, another wise man said that you have to be careful what you wished for.

He didn't know.

He swore to himself that he didn't know. Until tonight, he hadn't known that Yul still had nightmares about him dying-not-dying-maybe-dying in the scrapyard two years ago.

"It's only a dream," he said, again and again, as soothed a long arc up and down Yul's sweat-covered back. He sounded like a broken record, even to his ears.

It was weird, Sung-Ryong told himself. He had never seen Yul cry, not in the sense that had tears leaking down both eyes. But Yul sweated out his fears and sorrows, he knew. Like his whole body was in mourning.

The man had sat up, stared widely at him, cradling his hand, pressing an urgent finger against his strong pulse.

"Here," Sung-Ryong croaked, felt his heart breaking for some unknown reason. He took one of Yul's clammy hands and slipped it underneath his t-shirt. Placed it right above his heart.

Yul's hand was clammy, wet, and shaking. Like a puppy lost in a typhoon. It felt odd on his skin against his heart, sort of a counter-staccato beating oddly out of sync.

"You still dream about that night?" Sung-Ryong tried to make his tone light. "I don't get it. I mean, you know I survived. Long enough to fight you and then to save you from your own kidnappers, too..." _Long enough to bring down the bad guys, long enough to survive, long enough to get to know you... maybe?_ He didn't say. There's no use saying anyway. All of his words would be wasted, anyhow. Falling on deaf ears as they were wont to be. Yul was busy looking at his newest and freshest wounds courtesy of some Death Valley gangs.

"Who knows..." Yul said first hesitantly, then harshly, "Who the fuck knows why I dream what I dreamed," it came out harsher than he had intended. He snatched his hand away from underneath Sung-Ryong's shirt, out of Sung-Ryong's grasp.

He felt his hand cool off instantly and he glared at it like it was a traitor.

* * *

He knew. He knew why he had these dreams.

Everytime he heard Sung-Ryong got hurt somewhere, he'd tell himself he didn't care and then he'd go to sleep at night and have these dreams.

It began when he heard about a sting gone wrong. Sung-Ryong had gone undercover to help Gunsan Prosecution Service, and he had gone missing and gotten injured in the process. And it was Yul who had recommended Sung-Ryong to his hoobae.

He had refused to feel bad about it. But he did feel bad about it, especially since his hoobae kept sending text messages to update him on the man's condition. It felt bad enough that he went on and devised some flimsy excuse, hurriedly abandoned a meeting much to the chagrin of Chairwoman Jang, and rushed to Gunsan like a mad man.

He arrived just in time to see Sung-Ryong moved out of ICU and into the general ward. Yoon Ha-Kyung, and the rest of the Accounting staff had followed on his heels a little later. He didn't say it out loud, but he felt some odd sense of pride to be the first one to get there.

By the time the night shift nurse came to change Sung-Ryong's IV, even Prosecutor Han (and his little shadow Ga-Eun) had arrived. It was Park Myung-Suk who waved his thick wallet around and gotten Sung-Ryong transfered to the VVIP Floor, but Yul suspected that the hospital would gladly put Sung-Ryong in his own wing because his visitors were too loud.

It only got louder when Sung-Ryong's Gunsan menagerie blew past the door, and helped Prosecutor Han yell at the stupid Gunsan prosecution who had gotten Sung-Ryong injured in the first place.

Truth be told, it was the first time ever Yul regreted he had gone on the straight and narrow for the sake of the man who never did go straight nor narrow. Anyway, that snot-nosed hicktown prosecutor better thank the stars that Gunsan was already in the back of beyond that they couldn't kick him to anywhere else smaller.

By the time everyone left early the next morning--it was a work week anyway--the hospital room had looked more like a bombed out karaoke lounge than a hospital room. Sung-Ryong was still blissfully out of it, pumped up with the good drugs and the happiest juice.

The nurse had come in and changed his bandages, and checked his IV. The cleaning people had come in and non-chalantly cleared all their debris as if this type of wildness happened all the time in hospitals.

Left alone with his ears still ringing, and the steady beat of Sung-Ryong's heart translated into a dispassionate electronic staccato, Yul felt tired suddenly.

And if he had fallen asleep with his hand wrapped around Sung-Ryong's wrist, his finger right above Sung-Ryong's reassuringly strong pulse... it would just be another habit he had picked up and not worth writing home about.

* * *

Sung-Ryong sat up stiffly against the headboard that Yul hated so much. The padding had gone the way of dust bunnies, and the screws were trying their hardest to give him tetanus. But still he sat quietly and let Yul study every scrape and every bruise he had.

He stared intently at Yul's lips instead, trying to distract himself from the heat of those roaming figures and piercing gaze.

He knew what Yul wanted to say, but would never say because of his damned pride. He knew it like he knew the truth about himself.

* * *

Yul pressed on a nasty bruise just beneath Sung-Ryong's collarbone, thankful that it was not cracked, let alone broken. He had seen the XRays, one among many, memorized it as he waited for Sung-Ryong's anesthetics to wear off.

There was a hitch, then a hiss. He looked up and saw Sung-Ryong's pained smile. The smile that he gave when he was trying to dismiss something important as unimportant.

"What?" he asked sulkily.

Another smile bloomed on the face Yul hated to say he adored the most. The impish smile, the smile that was often a signal of all the crazy bad things to come. The smile that would get him into trouble. "When are you going to ask me?"


End file.
